1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to a computer system, more particularly, to a monitoring device for monitoring and recording the system state of the computer system.
2. Related Art
At present, various kinds of computer systems are widely used in many occasions such as a government, a commercial office, a family or a personal occasion for storing or processing important information. Since the working time of the system becomes longer, or the user operates improperly, errors often come up, or the computer system needs maintenance.
Generally speaking, the computer system can remove the errors or restore through specific steps, and the manufacturers of the computer system provide the basic technology instructions or a service line to the users as a remote assistance. However, the computer system has large amounts of software and hardware. In order to determine the errors accurately and choose the right method, the operators must have some professional knowledge and practical maintenance experience in the computer system. It's not easy for common users to operate and make determination.
When the configuration of the computer system fails, the user usually needs to contact with the technician or the professional failure analysis engineer (FAE) via the Internet (such as an E-mail or an automatic electric report) or a telephone. Then, the maintenance process may be as follows.
First, the technician gets to know the problem from the remote end and requests the user to execute different application programs (such as a RS-232 console, telnet or other application programs with a text interface or a graphical user interface (GUI)). The user end collects the system information one by one according to the operating steps to feedback to the technician. The operating steps may include dozens of commands according to the complexity of the system. In some complicated occasions, according to the conditions or a contract, the technician needs go to the user end to collect the system information via the operating steps, or the user needs to send the product to the manufacturer by himself or herself.
Second, after the system information collection is finished, the technician analyzes the error according to the professional knowledge or the experience.
Then, the technician may update the firmware, change the system settings, restore the system default values or replace the components to maintain the computer system.
The conventional maintenance method above can be performed on the assumption that the computer system is on and can enter the operating system. However, if the computer system cannot enter the operating system normally due to some unclear reasons, the maintenance engineer cannot know whether the software and the hardware of the computer system are changed or not before the error occurs. Thus, it's harder to find the error cause, and the responsibility ownership is unclear.
The conventional method above needs the professional technicians with specific knowledge to operate or to routinely update the computer system to remove the errors. Thus, the manufacturer pays a higher cost, and the maintenance efficiency is low.
The invention provides a monitoring device for the computer system. The monitoring device uses a memory member as a black box of the computer system to record the information of the system operating process.